Contents Only Insurance Quotes

Death is liberating only if one has planned for it. But I think no one truly does, except for a few people with suicidal inclinations, or perhaps, deeply content wandering ascetics. For most of us mortals, life insurance is the one thing that gives us the reassurance of planning well for the event of our death.

All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

There is no natural safeguard in the English language against the faults of haste, distraction, timidity, dividedness of mind, modesty. English does not run on its own rails, like French, with a simply managed mechanism of knobs and levers, so that any army officer or provincial mayor can always, at a minute’s notice, glide into a graceful speech in celebration of any local or national event, however unexpected. The fact is that English has altogether too many resources for the ordinary person, and nobody holds it against him if he speaks or writes badly. The only English dictionary with any pretension to completeness as a collection of literary precedents, the Oxford English Dictionary, is of the size and price of an encyclopedia; and pocket-dictionaries do not distinguish sufficiently between shades of meaning in closely associated words: for example, between the adjectives ‘silvery’, ‘silvern’, ‘silver’, ‘silvered’, ‘argent’, ‘argentine’, ‘argentic’, ‘argentous’. Just as all practising lawyers have ready access to a complete legal library, so all professional writers (and every other writer who can afford it) should possess or have ready access to the big Oxford English Dictionary. But how many trouble about the real meanings of words? Most of them are content to rub along with a Thesaurus—which lumps words together in groups of so-called synonyms, without definitions—and an octavo dictionary. One would not expect a barrister to prepare a complicated insurance or testamentary case with only Everyman’s Handy Guide to the Law to help him; and there are very few books which one can write decently without consulting at every few pages a dictionary of at least two quarto volumes—Webster’s, or the shorter Oxford English Dictionary—to make sure of a word’s antecedents and meaning.

The next time you go to the supermarket, look closely at a can of peas. Think about all the work that went into it—the farmers, truckers, and supermarket employees, the miners and metalworkers who made the can—and think how miraculous it is that you can buy this can for under a dollar. At every step of the way, competition among suppliers rewarded those whose innovations shaved a penny off the cost of getting that can to you. If God is commonly thought to have created the world and then arranged it for our benefit, then the free market (and its invisible hand) is a pretty good candidate for being a god. You can begin to understand why libertarians sometimes have a quasi-religious faith in free markets. Now let’s do the devil’s work and spread chaos throughout the marketplace. Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. All labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check for an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month when you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance premium. Under such a system, there is little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of food insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you. As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by Care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs. That, says Goldhill, is what we’ve done to ourselves. As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account—that is, as long as someone else is always paying for your choices—things will get worse.

Kirkus Reviews: Cretikos presents a brief but thorough introduction to properly calculating an insurance value for one’s property. The author argues that there are fundamental flaws in the property insurance system, particularly in Australia, the principalcountry in his analysis. At the heart of the issue, he asserts, is Building Sum Insured Value (BSI), which is the monetary amount that the holder of an insurance policy receives in case of total loss. However, the formulas for calculating this amount are fatally flawed, Cretikos says, as they rely upon a calculation of replacement value—the value of the property immediately prior to the event that destroys it—and doesn’t factor in necessary supplementary costs, including temporary housing. Moreover, the standard formula neglects inflation over the policy period, and especially increased building costs. There’s currently “no legal definition of destruction, catastrophe, total loss, and constructive total loss,” nor a standardized interpretation of the competencies required to be a Building Insurance Valuation Specialist Valuer Practitioner. With impressive rigor, the author explains not only the technical challenges posed by the current understanding of BSI, but also preventative measures and techniques one can adopt to avoid being disastrously uninsured; for example, there’s a meticulous discussion of making a claim for the value of the contents of a property. Also, Cretikos carefully reviews inadequacies in the legal system that encourage too-low BSI valuations and suggests ameliorating legislation (although these discussions are mostly specific to New South Wales, Australia). He makes a strong case that the insurance industry is plagued by a “denial culture” in which companies aggressively attempt to avoid paying justified benefits, even if he does so in sometimes awkward prose: “Insurance providers employ deliberately crafted legal jargon to avoid making complete schedule-related payments that are rightfully owed, even if this results in the policyholder being compelled to bear out-of-pocket expenses that should be covered by Additional Benefits or other supplementary expenses.” Still, this brief instructional guide offers a wealth of practical knowledge. An expert tour of some fundamental building-insurance issues.